Anthony Doerr's "All the Light We Cannot See": A Powerful Story of Love and War

Bubblecat1980: I looked for this having seen a trailer for the new show and feeling intrigued. I also know 9/10 times the show never does the book justice so I wanted to read the book, not watch the show. I’m so glad I found it, the writing is beautiful. The stories compelling and flow together so well. I read all the time, but I haven’t read anything as well put together as this for a very long time. Highly recommend.

United Kingdom on Oct 13, 2023

Anuradha GuptaAnuradha Gupta: "So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?”

War stories have a way into the heart that none others have. More than 8 decades and counting, World War II never ceases to be astonishing when it comes to writing stories about it, more when it becomes the center of human life. Having recently watched the documentary about the war, I was keen on picking up novels based on it and this one came highly recommended by my online readers’ group.
All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr is the story of the blind Marie-Laure, the self-doubting Werner Pfenning, and the scared old Etienne LeBlanc. Living in places miles away from each other, their lives intertwine in a manner that is beautifully ugly.

Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.

At the age of 6 years, Marie-Laure lost her eyesight, irreversibly. Living with her locksmith father in the city of Paris, she soon learns to navigate the city with the help of the proportionate city model that her father makes for her. Accompanying him to his workplace, the Natural History Museum, she gels up with the researchers...

India on Sep 29, 2020

Devyani SenDevyani Sen: The story is written in a non-linear fashion and covers the years 1934-2014…

It’s 1934. Marie-Laurie Le Blanc lives in Paris and is six years old when she loses her eyesight and for the first time learns about the priceless “Sea of Flames”- an accursed gemstone with a brilliant blue color and a touch of red at it’s center which lays hidden for the past 200 years in the vaults of the National Museum of Natural History, where Marie’s father, Daniel Le Blanc works as the principle locksmith. Marie shares a very tender and solicitous relationship with her father. Her father builds her a small and an artistic model of the city in which they live, gets her books in Braille, makes her solve ingenious puzzles and tries his best to make Marie-Laurie capable of living life on her own. Her father, with strong dedication and utmost determination, tries to make sure that nothing stops his little chérie from pursuing her dreams and flying high.

Werner Pfennig is an eight year old German albino boy who lives with his sister Jutta at an orphanage in Zollverein, Germany. Since his very childhood, Werner has been extremely inquisitive and agog about things going on around...

India on Aug 30, 2020

Ralph Blumenau: Part of this hugely inventive novel charts, separately, in very short chapters and in the urgent Historic Present, the lives of Marie-Laure LeBlanc and Werner Pfennig. The novel follows the now modish fashion, which I find very irritating, of moving backward and forward in time.

Marie-Laure, born in 1928 in Paris, became blind at the age of six. Her mother had died in childbirth; her loving father, Daniel, teaches her to “see”, using her fingers, training her memory. He is a locksmith employed at the Museum of Natural History, and his hobby is making small models, for example of the streets of their neighbourhood in Paris, which his daughter, using her fingers, can learn to navigate. She absorbs information about the world, also from Braille books, which fascinate her. The author is brilliant as describing what it is like to make some sense of the world when you are blind.

Locked securely away in the Museum of Natural History is a valuable diamond, called the Sea of Flames, to which is attached a legend that anyone who owns it will not die, but that disasters will strike his family or friends. People half believe the story.

When the war starts, the...

United Kingdom on Feb 18, 2018

Denise Baer: Anthony Doerr’s descriptions are like no others. He molds landscapes, wars with words until my heart thumped from the vision he created for me. They’re unique. I’d like to share a few of the descriptions that I enjoyed.

“To the bombardiers, the walled city on its granite headland, drawing ever closer, looks like an unholy tooth, something black and dangerous, a final abscess to be lanced away.”

“The appetite for oxygen is such that objects heavier than housecats are dragged into the flames.”

“His breath smells like crushed insects.”

“As though a weary tide stirs stones in the old woman’s lungs.”

The way he guides the reader’s vision of a place, destruction, appearance, made me wish I had a pinky size of his talent. I’m a reader who loves and underlines phrases and sentences that stand out. That I haven’t read before. Strands of words, like a string of pearls, fitted together to catapult me into another world. Who let me become friends or enemies with the characters. Some writers know how to bring me into their worlds where I get to exercise all senses and emotions.

There will be spoilers in this review, so if...

United States on Jan 20, 2016

Tigerlily64: If I could give “All The Light We Cannot See” more than five stars, I would. I read this amazing book on Kindle and listened to it on Audible, as well. BTW the narrator on Audible, Zach Appelman, is really excellent. His ability to pronounce the French and German names, his articulation and his pregnant pauses really added to the reading of this book.

Anthony Doerr’s book is simply stunning. Dazzling is a good word for it. I have reviewed many other books and have sometimes said this or that writer writes fluidly and well. I have given five stars to quite a few writers. “All The Light We Cannot See” is a higher level of excellence that not many authors achieve. No wonder Anthony Doerr won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for fiction with this book!

The chapters are short and beautifully written. I could say “beautifully and elegantly painted”; they remind me of a painting. This book is poetic, creative, imaginative and historically enlightening as well. Science and technology, it’s fascination and the power to help or harm, is explored along with the characters’ thoughts and feelings; we learn about their courage or lack of and why they make their individual...

United States on Oct 14, 2015

Radek: “What mazes there are in this world. The branches of trees, the filigree of roots, the matrix of crystals, the streets her father recreated in his models... None more complicated than the human brain, Etienne would say, what may be the most complex object in existence; one wet kilogram within which spin universes.”

I’m a sucker for beautiful writing and this is a very beautifully written novel. Doerr always has full imaginative command of his detail and, even if occasionally he feeds too much protein into his sentences, is thus able to evoke his images searingly and poignantly. The novel is a visual delight which is an especially brilliant achievement when you consider he’s often writing about blindness. Doerr’s poetic sentence writing often transfigures the familiar, allowing us to see the natural world afresh. His prose strips us of our own blindness to the beauty in the commonplace. The natural world pervades this novel like a kind of scripture. The goodies are aligned to the natural world; the baddies see it as little more than resources for furthering ambition. This being one of the many fairy tale motifs the novel dramatises. Because it can be read as a...

United Kingdom on May 04, 2015